Commencing an orderly shutdown, I think

Ok, so it's become reasonably obvious that I haven't gotten around to blogging in far too long, and there isn't really any strong suggestion that this is likely to change in the immediate future. There are various reasons/excuses I could offer for my laziness, but those who have been tracking me on facebook have probably heard about all of the adventures (travel, medical and romantic) of the past year or so - and so I think the time has come to post a 'farewell' type of post up here to give an orderly ending to the saga. I guess this blog has been a bit of fun, it's been adventurous, it's been an avenue for me to spout my occasionally ill-considered opinions in the general direction of The Internets just in case anyone happens to wander by and decide to read any of what I have to say... and it seems to have come to a natural end. I'm going to leave all the "content" up here, just in case it happens to be interesting or useful to anyone, and I may even drop back in sporadically to say hi - but for now, this is probably it. Thanks everyone, it's been fun.

Red Bull really does give you wings...

A nice video of Mark Webber's latest aerial-style Formula 1 adventures here:


(the interesting bit starts at 1:20 or so - and the commentary pretty clearly isn't in English - sounds like German or Dutch to me, but I may be completely wrong on that, given that I don't actually speak either language...)

Anyway, the main reason I'm posting this is because he actually walked away from that crash completely unhurt - so score a big plus for safety engineering in F1 cars! Not so many years ago, that would have been at the very least some badly broken bones, or potentially fatal, but some very clever engineers have done a lot of brilliant work to help keep the drivers all in one piece, even when the car, um, isn't any more.

Long time no post... again

Ok, so it's been absolutely ages since I put anything up on here. The best reason for this is that I've had a certain number of other things to do that have been more urgent than expounding my ill-founded opinions onto the internet... but such if life. Also, I had planned to upload a bunch of photos, but the Blogger photo-uploader is so horrid and slow that I've decided I'm going to post them on Facebook instead, because their uploader tool is much nicer - so if you want to find photos from now on, they'll be on my profile here.

So anyway, this post finds me in Berkeley (just across the bay from San Francisco), which will be 'home' for the next couple of months; I'm here on an environmental technology research fellowship (Brian Robinson Fellowship) from the Banksia Foundation, working with one of the best research groups in the world at putting tiny little pieces of various types of cement and concrete in front of extremely expensive and shiny X-ray machines, and that sort of stuff. I consider this to be really fun - and Berkeley is a really nice place to be at this time of year, the weather has been absolutely stunning so far. I've also done a brief side-trip down to Merida, Mexico for a conference on the durability of concrete under "severe" conditions - which was scientifically really useful, as well as being an extremely well-organised and fun week.

Anyway, no post from me would be complete without a sequence of my vaguely-organised bullet points:

- It's amazing that there can be 100 channels of cable TV in this motel, and nothing worth watching. Or maybe it just means I'm getting pickier... :)

- In a minor miracle, I have found a couple of places here that make drinkably strong coffee - which is a step up from most other US cities I've been to. One of them is even not all that bitter or burnt-tasting..!

- A new Trader Joe's has just opened across the street from where I'm staying here, and is now my favourite food store in the entire country

- Skype video calling is a technological marvel

- I have no idea how they do it, but almost every burger place in the US manages to produce morsels of absolute deliciousness. It's a good challenge for me to try to avoid eating too many of them and getting fat. Ditto the burritos. The pizza isn't quite up to the same standards, though :S

- Why do people design motel rooms with only one electricity socket?

- Berkeley is a very environmentally conscious place - everyone recycles almost everything (more so than I've seen anywhere else outside of Europe), and it's the first time I've ever found myself wondering what is the grammatically correct plural of the word 'Prius'...

- The Bay Area has a brilliant metro system (the BART), but the seats in the carriages could really do with an occasional laundering...

- I still don't get baseball.

Anyway, keep an eye on facebook for photos from the US, Mexico, China, and maybe even some historical(ish) ones if I get excited...

And going back even further in time...

...I'm finally catching up with posting the photos from my trip at Christmas as well. So, in approximately no particular order, I've got some holiday happy snaps from Vienna. I love Vienna - it's a place where, given sufficient budget (and yes, that is potentially an issue), a tourist with even half an interest in the arts will never run out of cool things to look at. And so, although my interest in the arts (particularly the painting bit of said arts) is probably at most a half an interest, I do love Vienna for its cool museums, classy old palaces, brilliant collections of shiny stuff, and coffee and cake. Oh, the coffee and cake...! If you can persuade the snooty waiters in the cafes to bring any to you, that is - we managed to get ourselves ignored (on the basis, I believe, of looking too touristy) in a cafe for long enough that we just gave up and left, and found somewhere else to eat instead.

The one trap I have to mention regarding Vienna is the shortage of power sockets in the hotel rooms. I don't know if this was just the place we stayed at or if it's representative of a trend of some sort, but we had a single power outlet in the entire room. So, there were three of us taking turns charging laptops, cameras and mobile phones on the one outlet, which is a nice logistical challenge considering the number and variety of power outlets required for all our variously international hardware...

And yes, although I've been there twice now, I do need to go back to Vienna again. We only had 3 days there, which added to the 1 1/2 days I got to spend there a couple of years ago adds up to at least a week short of getting to all the museums I wanted to see. Still haven't made it to MUMOK, the Leopold museum or the Natural History museum, plus a bunch of the others whose names I can't remeber right now and am too lazy to look up on Wikipedia... And of all the ones I've been to, the only real disappointment was the Secession museum - all the good Klimt paintings are actually elsewhere, so in spite of that being the building where he did a bunch of good work, it's full of abject junk (except for the big Klimt frieze in the basement - which is basically worth the price of admission all by itself, I have to say).

So anyway, enough waffling, and on to the pics...

The European adventures of Super-Camera, part the first

So anyway, I've finally gotten around to starting to post photos from our travels over the summer - with a shiny new digital SLR-type camera (my first ever decent camera) to record the excitement in some extremely pretty ways. I'm going to work through in roughly backwards-chronological order, because I just have to be difficult. So, first up is Barcelona, the site of a very enjoyable weekend visit (via some flights on Ryanair, who didn't actually strand us or rip us off, but whose planes would be vastly improved y enabling the seats to recline)... Barcelona has some pretty stunning scenery and (particularly) architecture, including the Sagrada Familia (that's the big church which I've got a bunch of pics of), and a load of other stuff by Gaudi, who I didn't know much about before I went there, but have decided is extremely cool.

Yes, I managed to get to the beach on my summer holidays...

Wasn't exactly swimming weather (the ocean is a little bit frozen here, as the photo shows), but still, it's a beach. Didn't stay for long, though - temperatures well below freezing and a howling gale provided a strong need to rush back inside and have a warm coffee.....

No, I haven't vanished...

Ok, so it's been almost forever since I posted anything on here, and this isn't actually going to be a very long post at all... mainly just posting a link to this, which is (as far as I can tell) an actual exam paper from an undergrad subject that was very popular among the "student athlete" population of a major US university. To quote some of the questions (and yes, these are a pretty representative selection of the 20 multiple-choice questions that were on this exam paper, with the spelling and random capitalisation errors fixed by me...):

How many goals are on a basketball court?

How many halves are in a college basketball game?

How many points does a 3-point field goal count for in a basketball game?

Mmm, academic rigour... And yes, the "lecturer" (one of the assistant coaches of the basketball team) was fired for this, among other misdeeds.

But anyway - I did promise various people that I'll upload some photos from my most recent trip to Europe here at some point, and I do intend to do that - I'm taking most of next month off work, so will have plenty of time for uploading photos and posting random rantings then. I've been spending this month writing and re-writing journal papers, fixing broken analytical instruments, and revising and modifying (and sometimes rewriting) teaching materials to use this semester... so I've earnt a break, I think.